Current Chemistry News

The latest research news.

Usually, the movement of electrons in a real material is rather different from the flow of water in a river. However, in extraordinary materials like the metal oxide palladium cobaltate, "electron rivers" can exist, as predicted theoretically over fifty years ago and now demonstrated by scientists from the MPI CPfS.

Image: One of the created "electron rivers". The flow takes place along the purple channel, and is studied using instruments attached to the blue, red, green and gold-coloured parts [Image credit: MPI CPfS].

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry report on the decryption of a cellular mechanism that explains the formation of protein aggregates.

Figure: Mistakes in the blueprint for proteins (mRNA) lead to the production of useless proteins in the ribosomes. Since the quality control is broken, these proteins accumulate and form toxic aggregates.

Image: Burgundy truffles ready for analysis. Scientists have analysed Burgundy truffles collected in central Europe and found they contain only negligible amounts of radioactive caesium, being safe for consumption.

A research team was able to switch the magnetic handedness of an iron pair between left- and right-handed.

The Figure shows a pair of magnetic iron atoms on top of a platinum crystal surface as 'seen' with a scanning tunneling microscope. The spectra of the left and right atom, taken with the same microscope, show characteristic gaps, that tell the scientists a clockwise rotation of the atoms' magnetization exists, as illustrated by the clockwise rotation of the arrows from the green to the red sphere representing the iron atoms. The reason for this right-handedness is a peculiar magnetic handshake mediated by the platinum atoms in the substrate below the iron pair which breaks the mirror symmetry, as apparent from the mirror image on the bottom.

Abandoning expensive and toxic materials in chemical synthesis: This is the goal pursued by scientists at the University of Wurzburg. In the magazine Angewandte Chemie, they describe a new way to achieve this goal, a surprise included. [Image Credit: Todd Marder]

Boroles could be a highly interesting class of materials for practical use in photovoltaic or LED applications - if it weren't for the molecules' extreme instability. Chemists from Wurzburg have now discovered a powerful stabiliser.

Image: Fluoromesityl groups boost the stability of boroles. F stands for fluorine, B for boron and C for carbon.

Image: Schematic experimental setup. When different types of molecules are removed from the metal surface, the van der Waals forces can be determined by frequency changes at the tip of the atomic force microscope. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications and could help to improve fundamental simulation methods for chemistry, physics, biology, and materials science.

Chemists at the University of Basel in Switzerland have succeeded in twisting a molecule by combining molecular strands of differing lengths.

Image: Based on the strands of different lengths (blue and gray), the new helical molecule (right) adopts a spatial arrangement (schematic diagram in the center) that resembles the banister of a spiral staircase [Credit, Illustration: University of Basel, Department of Chemistry].

Precise activity measurements on Cl-36 samples refute a dependence of the decay rate on the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Image: The normalized activity as a function of time shows no dependence on the season in PTB's data, contrary to the data obtained at the Ohio State University Research Reactor (OSURR) [Image credit: PTB].

Catalytic tandem reaction for the conversion of lignin and bio-oil by hydroxylation of phenols to form arenes.

Image: The conversion of lignin into low-boiling-point arenes instead of high-boiling-point phenols could greatly facilitate conventional refinery processes. A new procedure for the depolymerization of lignin and simultaneous conversion phenols into arenes is described.

[Source: Angewandte Chemie]

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Last update: 18 Oct 2016

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